Crédit Agricole Deploys Caplin Xaqua for Fixed Income Trading

Crédit Agricole Corporate and Investment Bank (CIB) is live with a new web-based single-dealer platform for fixed-income and structured notes trading from data and trading technology vendor Caplin Systems.

The bank deployed the vendor's Caplin Xaqua and Caplin Trader platforms for vanilla interest rates swaps and euro medium-term notes, according to Nick Green, head of fixed-income markets e-business at Crédit Agricole CIB. "Our objective was to provide our clients with the ability to trade a range of rates-based instruments via the web," he says.

The new trading capabilities are currently available to internal staff within the companies that make up Crédit Agricole Group, but officials plan to expand trading support to a wider range of products and make the system available to external clients, says Green.

Earlier this year, Caplin announced version 2.0 of its Caplin Trader web client framework for Caplin Xaqua that will support multi-leg trades, list trading through copy-and-paste from Microsoft Excel, and enhanced charting capabilities.

Paul Caplin, CEO of Caplin Systems, said at the time that the release would handle more updates with lower latency and increased reliability, and serve more asset classes. "It requires some work to upgrade to 2.0 with the new directory structure but the benefits of it are very large," he added.

Caplin Trader 2.0 supports all major operating systems, namely versions 6, 7 and 8 of Microsoft Internet Explorer; versions 3.5 and higher of the Firefox open-source browser; as well as Google's Chrome and Apple's Safari browsers. The platform will work with the Opera browser, although because Caplin customers have made little demand for it, the vendor does not formally support it, according to officials.